Unseen 'back to the future' trend in workplace. (Commentary).

THE one thing you can say for certain about the future is that it isn't going to turn out the way anybody predicts. So, we won't be vacationing on Venus this year.

There still aren't any robots serving cocktails when we get home.

And, no, you don't need to learn Russian. Here's something else few predicted: Our working lives are going to take on a shape and pattern that our grandparents would find familiar.

For at least two decades, futurologists have made a comfortable living telling us that work is on the cusp of a revolution. The catalogue of predictions has the nostalgic feel of an old record.

Out would go old-style, nine-to-five office drones. In would come new-style, flexible portfolio workers. A combination of new technology, globalization, and changing social trends would blow apart the 1950s model of corporate life.

Career? Forget it. Twenty-first century workers would hop from job to job and project to project. They would have "portfolios" of tasks, while striking enviable balances between work and personal life.

The office? Call in the bulldozers. Employees in the 21st century would be connected to everything simultaneously through a maze of pipes (broadband, ISDN, 3G -- take your pick). They would hot-desk their way around the world, working from home or a beach in the Maldives.

The nine-to-five, 40-year working life? That was supposed to be history. The experts told us we would struggle to fill our leisure hours. Mornings would consist of a choice between golf and plasma-screen, interactive TV viewing. Afternoons would be a mix of yoga and a couple of hours "re-skilling" for our next "project."

It all sounded so sweet. There's only one problem. There's not much sign of it happening. A recent conference in London organized by Britain's Economic and Social Research Council punctured the myths that have evolved around the way working lives are supposed to be developing.

What is surprising is not the way work is changing. It's the way work is staying the same.

The ESRC offered the following findings on what has happened to work in Britain over the last decade: Nine out of 10 people still have full-time permanent jobs. Only one person in 20 is a contract worker.

Average job tenure has risen to seven years and four months from six years and two months. Self-employment jumped from 5 percent to 11 percent of the workforce between 1979 and 1984. Since then, it has dropped back to 7 percent. The number of manual workers remained stable at 40 percent of the workforce.

Most new jobs created came in traditional occupations -- hairdressers, sales assistants and nursery workers, for example. The message? Work is pretty much the same it has always been.

The only big change the ESRC found is one virtually none of the futurologists predicted. Far from wrestling with too much leisure time, most of us have spent the past decade working harder.

As companies cope with pension deficits while governments struggle to improve the performance of flagging economies, we can expect the working-harder theme to dominate the news as well as our lives.

The next time someone mentions the leisure society to you, tell them you're too busy to think about it.

Matthew Lynn is a columnist with Bloomberg News.